Chapter 22. C# Naming and Coding Conventions

Naming conventions have long been understood to be a beneficial
practice in software development, for a variety of reasons elucidated
more clearly and persuasively elsewhere. The benefits of a naming
convention, however, take special meaning in the cross-language
environment that .NET offersfor the first time, a class
library written in C# can be accessed verbatim from VB, C++, Eiffel,
and any other ".NET-consumer"
language, compiler, or environment. While "industry
practices" are hard to discuss in an industry that
has yet to even ship its first release, Microsoft has released some
guidelines to its own naming conventions, used predominantly in the
Framework Class Library; even if you and your development shop choose
to use alternative conventions, understanding the naming conventions
of the FCL is key to using it effectively.

There are three elements of naming guidelines:

Case (capitalization)

Mechanics (class names, method names, and so on)

Word choice (consistent terminology and phraseology)

Much of this information can also be found in the Microsoft
documentation set.